11-13 May 2018, Gregynog Hall

The Thirtieth Annual Conference
of the Association for Welsh Writing in English

Keynote Speakers

Creative Keynote Speaker: Alys Conran, winner of the 2017 Wales Book of the Year for Pigeon

The final keynote will be announced shortly: please visit the AWWE website for latest updates.

Call for Papers

​“‘Home’. When you say a word slowly it can seem suddenly strange. ‘Home’. Is that really how you spell it? And what does it mean? ‘Hoam’. ‘Hohm’.” – John Barnie, Footfalls in the Silence: A Memoir (2014)

Our thirtieth anniversary conference will ask what ‘home’ means within the context of the English-language literary traditions of Wales. In his 1977 volume Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan suggested that home is ‘the focal point of a cosmic structure’, and argued that ‘Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the center of the world.’ More recently, Michael Allen Fox has proposed that ‘Self and home are inseparable elements, with each depending on the other for its existence and properties.’ He has also emphasised concepts of familiarity and belonging: ‘In English, “home” stands for a place of residence, belonging, and attachment’ and is bound up with ideas of ‘familiarity, attraction, warmth of feeling, pride, a special sense of bonding’. The primary emotional content of home has similarly been articulated by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling who note that home is not just a ‘site’, but is crucially ‘an idea and an imaginary imbued with feelings’.

Wales and the World:
Re-Framing the Literature of Wales in an International Context

The Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English

Friday 1st April – Sunday 3rd April 2016
Gregynog Hall, Newtown

Call for Papers
Wales has a distinctive national culture. The 2011 Census, however, indicated that the Welsh, like other British nationals, were becoming more culturally diverse. This is not surprising: the effects of the World imposing itself on Wales – industrialisation in the nineteenth century, for example – are continuous and impact profoundly on its literature.

Simultaneously, the Welsh have reached outwards beyond the confines of their homeland: as explorers and travellers, in Africa and South America for instance. Wales, too, ‘sells’ itself through ‘exported’ literature and the arts: the Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations in 2015 provided a timely reminder of a national literature that is inter-national, not only within the U.K. but further afield in Europe and across the globe.